Cobb’s Ordeal

My third book, Cobb’s Ordeal: The Diaries of a Virginia Farmer, 1842-1872 (University of Georgia Press, 1997), grew out of my research for Old Southampton.  The devout, plainspoken Cobb wrote in a conversational style, candidly recording his innermost thoughts.  He offers a unique window into Southern society in the late antebellum era, wartime, and Reconstruction.  His diary also provides a painfully frank chronicle of a troubled marriage.

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Reviews of Cobb's Ordeal

“Cobb’s Ordeal, the diaries of a successful farmer and small slaveholder in Southampton County, Virginia, is a welcome addition to the growing shelf of first-hand narratives of rural life in the nineteenth-century South. . . . Superbly edited by Daniel W. Crofts, the resulting record is an intimate portrait of male experience by a member of the South’s much-heralded, but still understudied, ‘plain folk.’”—John T. Schlotterbeck, Journal of the Early Republic

“Although he lived during one of the most dramatic periods in American history, Cobb displayed an ongoing fascination with the prosaic details of the rural world that surrounded him. . . . He can still speak to us about his marriage, his farm, his slaves, and his neighbors in the authentic accents and idioms of his class, locale, and era.”—James Tice Moore, Civil War History

“Daniel William Cobb . . . poured out some thirty years of disappointments and frustrations in his private diary. . . . [It] is a fascinating, historically significant, if troubling, account of a profoundly unhappy man.”—Ellen Eslinger, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography